Meta had 77,986 full-time employees as of March 31, 2026, according to its Q1 2026 earnings report. Three weeks later, the company laid off 8,000 of them — roughly 10% of its workforce — in the largest single-round cut since the 2022–2023 “Year of Efficiency.” This post breaks down Meta’s current workforce size, layoff timeline, compensation figures, and the diversity data that is still available after the company stopped publishing annual DEI reports in 2025. Meta Employee Statis...

Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem. We’ve looked at a variety of construction productivity metrics , both for the US and for countries around the world, and found that construction productivity almost always rises much less in construction than it does in industries like manufacturing; often, it doesn’t improve at all. We’ve analyzed trends in construction costs in the US and around the world, and noted that constru...

At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We talk about our experiences with LLM-augmented programming (at that point - October 2025), we show our frustration that things we’ve been saying for thirty years still need to be said, we say how anything like a manifesto reunion needs to be led by a younger generation, and opine on what jun...

The trigonometric Fourier series is a beautiful mathematical theory that shows how to decompose a periodic function into an infinite sum of sinusoids. These are my notes on the subject, with some examples and the connection to linear algebra in Hilbert space. Coefficients of Fourier series Let’s assume that is a well-behaved 2L -periodic [1] function and that we can find coefficients a_n and b_n such that: \[f(x)=\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\left(a_n cos\frac{n\pi x}{L}+b_n sin\frac{...

Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staff. I think this is because OpenAI and Anthropic have both found product-market fit. Enterprise customers are now paying API prices I think they've found product-market fit And they're ramping up The AI-failure stories around this are pretty thin We also know the labs are s...

In my last post I used the word “clanker 1 ” as an alternative to “agent” quite consistently and probably excessively. That choice ended up attracting a lot more attention than I expected in the Hacker News comment section of that post and a number of folks had a very strong reaction: to them it sounded like a slur, in one case even something adjacent to the n-word. That reaction surprised me somewhat, but it also made me realize that I should write down what I mean by the word for f...

The stars are finally aligned again, and I’m back on the road for chapter 3 of this 10-part saga. Clear sky, not too warm, I have someone who can come pick me up and drive me back to my car, the calendar is empty, so we’re going for it. Contrary to the previous two segments of this walk, this one’s quite lean on the churches department—we’ll only see 3 of them—but it’s by far the most challenging one from a physical perspective. That is, if you’re a sane person and you do these...

First launch of SpaceX’s Starship V3 launch vehicle. Image: SpaceX SpaceX’s latest suborbital test flight of its two-stage Starship rocket on May 22, debuting a refined V3 version , was successful in its liftoff, stage separation, mock satellite deployment test, and the upper stage’s soft oceanic splashdown while its heat shield remained intact through atmospheric reentry. However, the flight failed in even attempting a soft splashdown of the large booster, which impacted somewhere u...

The sun is one of the most studied objects in the history of science. The ancient Babylonians and Chinese tracked sunspots and solar eclipses, etching their observations into clay tablets; these records would outlast their civilizations. When the telescope arrived in the early 1600s, astronomers such as Galileo Galilei, Christoph Scheiner, and Johannes Fabricius turned these instruments toward… Source The sun is one of the most studied objects in the history of science. The ancient Babyloni...

This is going to come as a shock—a SHOCK —to some of you, but I harboured a not insignificant obsession with liners when I was a teenager, both of the ocean and air kind. I loved reading about commercial ships and planes of yore, learning about how they were operated, and contrasting them to how we get around today. Some of my favourite tomes were technical reference manuals and so-called “coffee table” books that explored these incredible machines. You could keep your books on cars and...

Warfare today is increasingly defined by systems that can operate on the edge. Interest in autonomy for unmanned systems continues to grow, particularly for capabilities such as GPS- and comms-denied operations, autonomous mission execution, and teaming across platforms.    While the case for autonomy is clear, committing to a larger autonomy effort upfront can still feel high-risk. Before deploying autonomy in the field, customers need proof that autonomy will work reliably on their own s...

There is beauty in the moments between arriving and reaching your destination. I felt this yesterday in the moments before attending an event in Edinburgh last night. I had an hour before I needed to arrive and, the day being so warm, I decided to slow down and listen to the world around. I walked through the park with my eyes open under the evening sun for which I had been yearning for months. Every breeze through the air enlivened my senses. Every smile stuck a chord somewhere in my soul. Natu...

The technical paper for the Erdős Unit Distance Problem lists only "OpenAI" as an author. When Bill posted on Sunday about the Erdős distance problems, he mentioned the names of OpenAI researchers who prompted and checked the proof. Sebastien Bubeck of OpenAI reached out directly and later as a comment saying this was really an OpenAI-wide achievement, and we shouldn't just single out people at the end of the funnel. I agree with Bubeck for this paper, but it brings up some challenging ...

I have been tinkering with non-database stuff recently and I don't really have any of it in a place to share something fun about. So in the interim, here is a small collection of some tricks I like a lot. I like bitwise tricks a lot. Here's a couple that are not particularly useful, but are fun and cool. If you like these, you should read Hacker's Delight . 1. Average of two numbers The problem with computing the average of two numbers in the obvious way: (a + b) / 2 , is that a + b mi...

Are these weeknotes again ? Yes they are! Is this a fluke or is it a trend? Who knows! Who cares! Let’s do iiiiiittttttt. Current situation:  Not pictured: Raspberry hibiscus iced tea. There is always a beverage. Monday 18 May: Went for a walk early, before the rain set in. I adore a rainy day. Got a lot of work done. Afternoon thing canceled due to power outage from the storm. Evening thing canceled due to it being outdoors. Busy day became cozy da...

My note taking process has evolved a lot over the years. Originally I used my iPad with the Apple pencil, but having to charge it every few days was a pain. Then I switched to the Remarkable 2 , which was great and I didn't need to charge the pen. But as I produced more and more notes, it became awkward to search for them. Unfortunately, handwriting to text, and handwriting search both require a monthly subscription. Screw that. So I switched to the Supernote Nomad , which (in my opinion) ...

Pooch from Repkord dropped by my studio while he was in St. Louis, and asked a simple question: Can a 3D printer's heatbed act as an antenna? A fair question, as many an antenna is embedded in a PCB these days... and the traces on a PCB heatbed like the one used in Prusa's Core One look kinda like an antenna, if you squint the right way. Really, anything (or anyone) can be an antenna, given enough power. Pooch from Repkord dropped by my studio while he was in St. Louis, and asked...

“But in the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.” ― The Lord of the Rings There aren't many interesting stops on the 4-hour drive from Westport to the Abel Tasman National Park (apart from the overall high New Zealand baseline). However, the T-Rex Tree is a low-key spot I had to check out. Just imagine the Jurassic Park music and a big roar, which I won't share here for copyright reasons. Roaaaaaaaar! The Buller Gorge is an actual touristic s...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster .  In the last post we used simulated consumer processing time to reveal how important it is to set an appropriate value for max.poll.records to ensure the consumer parallelism that we expect. With a uniform distribution of messages over partitions, the rule of thumb was a value somewhat lower than: group.share.partition.max.record.locks / number of consumers per partition But the...

I wanted the bootstrap process to be simple; ideally a single command and it would be up and running. But that’s not what we have right now; just look at this monstrosity from the previous post : helm install cilium cilium/cilium \ --namespace kube-system \ --version 1.19.2 \ --set kubeProxyReplacement=true \ --set k8sServiceHost=10.1.4.10 \ --set k8sServicePort=6443 \ --set l2announcements.enabled=true \ --set externalIPs.enabled=true \ --set gatewa...

A lot of companies that build software don’t build products: they build cities. A product is something you create to sell to other people; a city is somewhere you live. If you’re working on the systems that keeps big companies and government agencies running, what you’re doing has a lot more in common with building a new subway line in a crowded residential district than it does with putting tires on a family car. A lot of companies that build software don’t build products: they build c...

luna, friend of eggbug (@luna@pony.social) · 24 May 2026 the year is 2021 she is decompiling a 20-year-old video game and finding cheat codes that aren't on gamefaqs the year is 2026 she is decompiling the exact same 25-year-old video game and finding the exact same cheat codes that she never got around to putting on gamefaqs last time So in the interest of not letting these cheat codes go forgotten again, here’s the full list. I’ve submitted them to GameFAQs too; at time of writi...

High end NVIDIA cards, and the server and power needed to run them, cost a lot of money, especially if you plan to reach enough VRAM to run massive models. The alternative, so far, has been Apple hardware, or the DGX Spark that, even if severely limited because of memory bandwidth, still allows to run LLMs prompt processing (prefill) fast enough. The Mac Studio provided up to 512GB unified memory, a solution with modest memory bandwidth (but much better than the Spark) and compute at a price tha...